Lottery games have become a time honored method of raising revenue for state and federal governments the world over. Traditional scratch-off and draw games have evolved over decades, supplying increasing revenue year after year. However, after decades of growth, the sales curves associated with traditional games seem to be flattening out with median sales per capita experiencing a sharp decline. This flattening of lottery sales growth is typically attributed to a fixed base of consumers that routinely purchase lottery products with very few new consumers choosing to participate in the lottery marketplace. Various analyses of state lottery sales data tend to support the hypothesis that lotteries rely heavily on an existing consumer base and more specifically on lottery “super users.” Three states (Rhode Island, South Dakota and Massachusetts) had 2014 lottery sales that topped $700 per capita. While ten states had per capita sales below $100, per capita sales for all state lotteries averaged almost $250. Demographically speaking, this existing base of lottery consumers is aging with younger consumers showing very little interest in participating in existing lottery offerings. Thus, the potential for ever-increasing lottery sales is increasingly problematic with the existing fixed base of consumers saturated. Consequently, both lotteries and their service providers are presently searching for more marketable forms of gaming that would appeal to a broader consumer base.
In addition to flattening sales, a static lottery consumer base is often cited when state legislatures debate whether lotteries represent a form of exploitation of problem gamblers. For example, “Stop Predatory Gambling”, which advocates an end to state-sponsored gambling recently stated, “State lotteries have a business model that's based on getting up to 70 to 80 percent of their revenue from 10 percent of the people that use the lottery . . . .” In Minnesota, a pending bipartisan bill would require 25% of lottery billboards to be dedicated to a warning about the odds of winning and gambling addiction, as well as information on where problem gamblers can seek help.
This phenomenon of a relatively small percentage of the population being responsible for a large majority of lottery sales is partially due to the commoditization of lottery tickets by ticket manufacturers. In the past decade, manufacturers of instant lottery tickets have developed techniques, which enabled stationary process color process images to be printed as display and on top of the scratch-off layers. This conventional printing method implies display and overprint images are stationary and do not change from one printing impression to the next during a single printing run—e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,569,512 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,647.
Lottery ticket production involves large volumes of variable information when designing the play styles and prize payout functions of the games; it is impractical to meet these requirements using conventional plate printing techniques such as flexographic printing to produce game play and validation information in the security areas (under the SOC) of tickets. Far too many plate changes would be required to produce the vast amount of secure variable indicia in more than two colors in the security areas to complete a run that consisted of large volumes of tickets, rendering plate printing for this purposes not viable. Thus, to date almost all lottery ticket variability has been confined to monochromatic variable indicia or two-spot color imaged by drop-on-demand ink jet with the display and overprints being (mostly) static from game to game. This, in turn, confines the instant lottery ticket product to high-volume print runs with very little experimentation in terms of theming as printed on the ticket and gaming experience due to the need to ensure that the vast majority of print runs sell out to be economically feasible.
Another reason for the high-volume, fixed plate printing manufacturing techniques typical of instant tickets is the lottery industry paradigm of non-failure production. With this paradigm any misprinted tickets should be identified during manufacturing and eliminated before they are delivered to the lottery and their retailers. If the lottery ticket manufacturer makes errors or omissions, they may be held liable, to a limited degree, for payment of prizes due to over redemption of lottery tickets. Thus, the justifiable requirements to achieve virtually zero errors have the unintended consequence of discouraging the amount of variable data on lottery tickets. As a result, manufacturers confine variability to indicia with display and overprint portions using fixed printing plates, which have a much lower error rate than any other type of imager.
An additional metric driving fixed plate printing of instant lottery tickets with small amounts of variable monochromatic indicia and barcode data are the high volumes of data required for variable process color printing of indicia. Present lottery instant ticket secure variable indicia printing technology employs one-bit (i.e., ink on or off) raster imaging at 240 dpi (dots per inch), while modern four-color digital imaging typically offers 8-bit-per-color intensity (i.e., 32-bits total per process color dot for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK—CMYK) with resolutions in excess of 800 dpi. The amount of data required for four-color indicia printing increases by over 355 times per square inch of printing surface verses monochromatic or spot color. Even by modern computing standards, an increase of over 355 times in the amount of data per variable square inch of instant ticket surface is a challenge to manage when multiplied by typical print run volumes of 10,000,000 to 500,000,000 tickets. If the visible, non-secure display and overprints are imaged in addition to the secure variable indicia, the data handling volumes grow almost exponentially.
The associated digital imager bandwidth required to handle this vast amount of image data further compounds the problem of four-color imaging of lottery tickets and again helps to explain why the industry favors fixed plate printing with only monochromatic variable indicia imaging. For example, assume that instant lottery tickets are printed with variable imaging across a narrow one-foot wide web at a low print speed of 100 FPM (Feet Per Minute). For monochromatic (1-bit) imaging at 240 dpi, a continuous imager data bandwidth of over 103 megabytes-per-minute (about 1.7 MB/second or about 14 megabits-per-second—14 Mbps) would be required to not pause the printing process. By contrast, four-color imaging (i.e., 32-bit at a higher resolution) over the same narrow web width (one foot) and relatively slow speed (100 FPM) will require an aggregate imager bandwidth of almost 37 billion-bytes-per-minute (about 617 MB/second or about 5 billion-bits-per-second—5 Gbps). In comparison, the maximum theoretical bandwidth of Ethernet cable 1000 BASE-T (i.e., category 5e cable—the highest standard) is only 1000 Mbps or 1 Gbps.
This very high amount of bandwidth necessary for digitally imaging four-color lottery ticket variable indicia and other areas also becomes problematic in terms of security. Real-time decryption of a continuous stream of approximately 5 Gbps of data (from the example above) can be problematic even when utilizing symmetrical encryption/decryption algorithms optimized for low processor burden (e.g., Blowfish, Advanced Encryption Standard—AES, etc.). Thus, the sensitive win or lose secure variable indicia data (i.e., the data that determine if a given ticket is a winner or loser) would most likely not be encrypted or decrypted ahead of the print run, requiring its cleartext embodiment to be stored in physically secure areas only. This proves problematic for any forms of distributed printing or printing on demand. This, in turn, limits instant ticket print production to secure centralized facilities with “big bang” (i.e., all at once) print runs, since securing cleartext indicia data over distributed printing environments or printing in multiple smaller (more efficient) print runs is too complex to be practical. Aside from bandwidth limitations, traditional drop-on-demand instant lottery ticket imaging does not allow for real time decryption due to limitations inherent in the internal printer machine's markup language.
In addition to security, auditing and validating the vast amount of imager data necessary for a four-color instant ticket print run are other challenging problems. Traditional monochromatic instant ticket imaging using monochromatic or spot color ink drop-on-demand is based on traditional variable indicia fonts created for a specific game, the final output being a raster image file with a resolution of 240 dpi. Tickets printed from this file and portions of the file are typically audited to ensure the game's integrity. Again, with the very high volumes of imager data inherent in four-color or high-resolution imaging, performing audits and verifying data are troublesome—especially in print on demand or distributed printing environments.
While there has been some industry effort to advance instant lottery ticket printing technology with digital imaging (most notably: U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,720,421; 8,074,570; and 8,342,576; and US Application Publication Nos. 2009/0263583; 2010/0253063; 2012/0267888; and 2014/0356537), none of this effort has addressed the problem of dealing with the vast amounts of data associated with four-color instant lottery ticket print runs, much less the more complex problems of secure printing on demand, distributed network printing, ensuring correctly printed variable indicia, and efficiently and securely processing relatively small stylized print runs specifically targeted at differing demographics.
In an attempt to de-commoditize lottery tickets, appeal to a broader base, and increase sales, especially United States lotteries have moved towards producing games with more entertainment value that can be sold at a premium price. Ideally, these games would include process color imaging and should be economically produced in smaller volumes, thereby allowing for game experimentation and targeting of different demographic groups other than core players. However, as described above, lottery ticket manufacturers have developed infrastructures that primarily support fixed plate printing, with monochromatic variable indicia imaging or at most dual spot color variable indicia imaging that inherently has a high start-up cost, thereby restricting print runs to high volumes to amortize the costs over longer print runs.
For example, ten-dollar instant ticket games with higher paybacks and more ways to win now account for over $5 billion a year in United States lottery sales. But, limited by the fixed plate and high-volume restrictions enforced by current manufacturing techniques or practices, these higher priced instant games are still generic in nature and consequently result in a minor percentage of overall game offerings with limited potential for assisting in consumer base diversification. In other words, the high-priced or high-volume nature of these games tends to drive the lotteries to generic and proven type of play (i.e., appealing to the existing player base) with very little experimentation and unique entertainment value relative to lower-priced instant tickets and consequently does not attract many new consumers.
Moreover, as gaming technology and systems continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, numerous new types of games and products become available that tend to distance themselves from the one-size-fits-all large-volume instant lottery ticket paradigm that has sustained the industry for decades. These gaming trends no longer support gaming to the masses, rather differentiation through information is favored, with games tracking and targeting such concepts as: predictive value, frequency, average bet, product identification, etc. However, tracking and targeting games to these concepts necessitates segmenting the player base into smaller and smaller groups or pools with each group or pool too small to sustain large volume games. Additionally, by concentrating lottery printing production in large secure facilities, the logistical challenges of distributing small game runs in addition to production challenges causes such games to be priced uneconomically and still resemble the standard instant ticket lottery product. Also, centralized production of large print runs inherently prohibits game spontaneity—e.g., seasonal tickets, greeting cards, collector cards, lottery tickets for specific chain stores, Super Bowl commemorative instant tickets celebrating the winning team in their home state, etc.
Another problem with targeted small-run instant lottery ticket printing utilizing existing technology is packaging. Traditional instant ticket packaging systems are web fed lines where the tickets are Z-folded at perforation lines, manually separated, scanned, activation cards printed, and shrink wrapped for shipping in cartons and pallets to the lottery warehouse. While efficient for large volumes of tickets, this type of inline packaging system does not readily accommodate different themed packs of tickets with potentially different store destinations.
Thus, it is highly desirable to develop instant ticket manufacturing techniques with more variable and dynamic appeal that provide methods of offering new gaming opportunities, particularly more customized and consequently smaller volume games. Ideally, these games should include process color digital variable printing, thereby allowing for flexibility and creativity for game designers to tailor games to a wide variety of small targeted segments heretofore not served by existing instant ticket gaming offerings, in turn appealing to a broader base of consumers.